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"MY DEAR LADY LUFA,--In part by means of the severe lesson I received
through you, a great change has passed upon me. I am no longer able to
think of myself as the important person I used to take myself for. It is
startling to have one's eyes opened to see one's self as one is, but it
very soon begins to make one glad, and the gladness, I find, goes on
growing. One's nature is so elevated by being delivered from the
honoring and valuing of that which is neither honorable nor valuable,
that the seeming loss is annihilated by the essential gain; the being
better makes up--infinitely makes up for showing to myself worse. I
would millions of times rather know myself a fool than imagine myself a
great poet. For to know one's self a fool is to begin to be wise; and I
would be loyal among the sane, not royal among lunatics. Who would be
the highest, in virtue of the largest mistake, of the profoundest
self-idolatry!
"But it was not to tell you this I began to write; it was to confess a
great wrong which once I did you; for I can not rest, I can not make it
up with my conscience until I have told you the truth. It may be you
will dislike me more for confessing the wrong than for committing it--I
can not tell; but it is my part to let you know it--and none the less my
part that I must therein confess myself more weak and foolish than
already I appear.
"You will remember that you gave me a copy of your drama while I was at
your house: the review of it which appeared in the 'Battery' I wrote
that same night. I am ashamed to have to confess the fact, but I had
taken more champagne than, I hope, I ever shall again; and, irreverent
as it must seem to mention the fact in such a connection, I was
possessed almost to insanity with your beauty, and the graciousness of
your behavior to me. Everything around me was pervaded with rose-color
and rose-odor, when, my head and heart, my imagination and senses, my
memory and hope full of yourself, I sat down to read your poem. I was
like one in an opium-dream. I saw everything in the glory of an
everlasting sunset, for every word I read, I heard in the tones of your
voice; through the radiant consciousness of your present beauty,
received every thought that awoke. If ever one being was possessed by
another, I was that night possessed by you. In this mood, like that, I
say again, of an opium-dream, I wrote the criticism of your book.
"But on the morning after the writing of it, I found, when I began to
read it, I could so little enter into the feeling of it, that I could
hardly believe I had actually written what lay before me in my own hand.
I took the poem again, and scanned it most carefully, reading it with
deep, anxious desire to justify the things I had set down. But I failed
altogether. Even my love could not blind me enough to persuade me that
what I had said was true, or that I should be other than false to print
it. I had to put myself through a succession of special pleadings before
I could quiet my conscience enough to let the thing go, and tell its
lies in the ears of the disciples of the 'Battery.' I will show you how
falsely I dealt. I said to myself that, in the first place, one mood
had, in itself, as good a claim, with regard to the worth of what it
produced, as another; but that the opinion of the night, when the
imagination was awake, was more likely to be just with regard to a poem
than that of the cold, hard, unpoetic day. I was wrong in taking it for
granted that my moods had equal claims; and the worse wrong, that all
the time I knew I was not behaving honestly, for I persisted in leaving
out, as factor in one of the moods, the champagne I had drunk, not to
mention the time of the night, and the glamour of your influence. The
latter was still present, but could no longer blind me to believe what I
would, most of all things, have gladly believed. With the mood the
judgment was altered, and a true judgment is the same in all moods,
inhabiting a region above mood.
"In confession, a man must use plain words: I was a coward, a false
friend, a false man. Having tried my hardest to keep myself from seeing
the fact as plainly as I might have seen it, had I looked it in the face
with the intent of meeting what the truth might render necessary, yet
knowing that I was acting falsely, I sent off, regardless of duty, and
in the sole desire of pleasing you, and had printed, as my opinion
concerning your book, what was not my opinion, had never been my
opinion, except during that one night of hallucination--a hallucination
recognized as such, for the oftener I read, the more I was convinced
that I had given such an opinion as must stamp me the most incompetent,
or the falsest of critics. Lady Lufa, there is nothing remarkable in
your poem. It is nicely, correctly written, and in parts skillfully
contrived; but had it been sent me among other books, and without
indication of the author, I should certainly have thrown it aside as the
attempt of a school-girl, who, having more pocket money than was good
for her, had been able to print it without asking her parents or
guardians. You may say this judgment is the outcome of my jealous
disappointment; I say the former was the outcome of my loving
fascination; and I can not but think something in yourself will speak
for me, and tell you that I am speaking honestly. Mr. Sefton considers
me worthy of belief; and I know myself worthier of belief than ever
before--how much worthier than when I wrote that review! Then I loved
you--selfishly; now I love the truth, and would serve you, though I do
not love you the same way as before. Through the disappointment you
caused me, my eyes have been opened to see the way in which I was going,
and to turn from it, for I was on the way of falsehood. Oh, Lady Lufa,
let me speak; forget my presumption; you bore with my folly--bear now
with what is true though it come from a foolish heart! What would it be
to us, if we gained the praises of the whole world, and found afterward
they were for what was counted of no value in the great universe into
which we had passed! Let us be true, whatever come of it, and look the
facts of things in the face! If I am a poor creature, let me be content
to know it! for have I not the joy that God can make me great! And is
not the first step toward greatness to refuse to call that great which
is not great, or to think myself great when I am small? Is it not an
essential and impassable bar to greatness for a man to imagine himself
great when there is not in him one single element of greatness? Let us
confess ourselves that which we can not consent to remain! The
confession of not being, is the sole foundation for becoming. Self is a
quicksand; God is the only rock. I have been learning a little.
"Having thus far dared, why should I not go further, and say one thing
more which is burning within me! There was a time when I might have said
it better in verse, but that time has gone by--to come again, I trust,
when I have that to say which is worth saying; when I shall be true
enough to help my fellows to be true. The calling of a poet, if it be a
calling, must come from heaven. To be bred to a thing is to have the
ears closed to any call.
"There is a man I know who forever sits watching, as one might watch at
evening for the first star to come creeping out of the infinite heaven;
but it is for a higher and lovelier star this man watches; he is waiting
for a woman, for the first dawn of her soul. He knows well the spot
where the star of his hope must appear, the spot where, out of the vast
unknown, she must open her shining eyes that he may love her. But alas,
she will not arise and shine. He believes or at least hopes his star is
on the way, and what can he do but wait, for he is laden with the burden
of a wealth given him to give--the love of a true heart--the rarest, as
the most precious thing on the face of his half-baked brick of a world.
It was easy for me to love you, Lady Lufa, while I took that for granted
in you which did not yet exist in myself! But he knows the truth of you,
and yet loves. Lady Lufa, you are not true! If you do not know it, it is
because you will not know it, lest the sight of what you are should
unendurably urge you toward that you will not choose to be. God is my
witness I speak in no poor anger, no mean jealousy! Not a word I say is
for myself. I am but begging you to be that which God, making you,
intended you to be. I would have the star shine through the cloud--shine
on the heart of the watcher! the real Lufa lies hidden under a dusky
garment of untruth; none but the eye of God can see through to the
lovely thing He made, out of which the false Lufa is smothering the
life. When the beautiful child, the real Lufa, the thing you now know
you are not, but ought to be, walks out like an angel from a sepulcher,
then will the heart of God, and the heart of George Sefton, rejoice with
a great joy. Think what the love of such a man is. It is your very self
he loves; he loves like God, even before the real self has begun to
exist. It is not the beauty you show, but the beauty showing you, that
he loves--the hidden self of your perfect idea. Outward beauty alone is
not for the divine lover; it is a mere show. Until the woman makes it
real, it is but a show; and until she makes it true, she is herself a
lie. With you, Lady Lufa, it rests to make your beauty a truth, that is,
a divine fact.
"For myself, I have been but a false poet--a mask among poets, a builder
with hay and stubble, babbling before I had words, singing before I had
a song, without a ray of revelation from the world unseen, carving at
clay instead of shaping it in the hope of marble. I am humbler now, and
trust the divine humility has begun to work out mine. Of all things I
would be true, and pretend nothing.
"Lady Lufa, if a woman's shadow came out of her mirror, and went about
the world pretending to be herself and deceiving the eyes of men, that
figure thus walking the world and stealing hearts, would be you. Would
to God I were such an exorcist as could lay that ghost of you! as could
say, 'Go back, forsake your seeming, false image of the true, the lovely
Lufa that God made! You are but her unmaking! Get back into the mirror;
live but in the land of shows; leave the true Lufa to wake from the
swoon into which you have cast her; she must live and grow, and become,
till she is perfect in loveliness.'
"I shall know nothing of the fate of my words. I shall see you no more
in this world--except it be as I saw you to-night, standing close to you
in a crowd. The touch of your garment sent no thrill through me; you
were to me as a walking shadow. But the man who loves you sees the
sleeping beauty within you! His lips are silent, but by the very silence
of his lips his love speaks. I shall soon--but what matters it! If we
are true, we shall meet, and have much to say. If we are not true, all
we know is that falsehood must perish. For me, I will arise and go to my
father, and lie no more. I will be a man, and live in the truth--try at
least so to live, in the hope of one day being true.
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